Digital Pens

ANOTO TECHNOLOGY: NATURAL USE OF A PEN ON A STANDARD PAPER

The pens are manufactured by various companies like Sony-Ericsson, Nokia, Logitech and Maxell: the 3rd generation pens are ultra light with completely natural use ergonomics and integrate the nec plus ultra of the opto-electronic and radio-transmission technologies.

Mean running time: approximately 5 hours of permanent use, 7 days in stand-by. Storage: up to 70 pages covered with handwritten texts or drawings, few hundred pages of forms, before any transaction also manageable at any time (during or after the writing). Connectivity: simply by hand, one can transmit the data to a PC with a PCMCIA card or an USB port, or to a Bluetooth mobile phone.

The transactions are done either locally (pen -> PC via Bluetooth or USB), or via internet (pen -> Bluetooth mobile phone -> web).

 

Absolute contextual recognition:

The papers - completely standards - receive a specific ink pattern of very tiny dots, practically invisible to the naked eyes.

Each basic matrix of 6 x 6 dots (1.8 x 1.8 mm) transmits a specific information to the pen:

The pen uses a micro camera which take 50 images/seconde to register its movements relatively to the pattern.

If one prints all the pattern available, one could cover a surface greater than Europe and Asia combined !

According to the functionalities linked to the different parts of the pattern, the movements are recognized as drawings, texts or specific values of any kind and interpreted consequently by the information system.

The text data recovered by the information system is interpreted by a module of Intelligent Character Recognition (ICR).